Program Offerings: Fall 2008
NEW Short-Term Abroad Course For Fall 2008!
INTERESTED STUDENTS PLEASE CONTACT
ROBERT MCRUER AT
rmcruer@gwu.edu
English 179.60
Transnational Film Studies and LGBTQ Cultures
Wednesdays 2-4 PM
George Washington University
Department of English and Office for Study Abroad
This course is offered through the short-term study abroad program at GW, and includes a week at the Prague International LGBTQ Film Festival, leaving Washington, DC, November 5, 2008 and returning November 13, 2008.
The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called “queer” studies over the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or transgendered people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been linked to other, complex questions, involving political economy, globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires threaten “the nation” as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our world? How have identities such as “gay” and “lesbian” circulated globally? How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have those identities at times functioned imperialistically, especially as “gay tourism” has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely, what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender, class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements organized around identity?
This course will thus consider how questions of queer representation, particularly in film, converge with questions of queer globalization(s). It will provide students with a complex vocabulary for theorizing a range of issues, by moving them over the course of the semester through four units: an introduction to the analysis of film; a survey of contemporary queer film studies; an introduction to contemporary work at the intersection of queer studies and transnational studies (with some specific emphasis on lgbtq cultures and eastern Europe); and the Prague International LGBTQ Film Festival (on-site in Prague, intended to bring all these issues together).
Students at Charles University in Prague will be taking a course similar to the Washington, DC, course, under the direction of Professor Katerina Kolarova of the Department of Gender Studies. In addition to the festival itself, the week in Prague will involve meetings between the two courses, putting U.S. and Czech students in conversation with each other.
SYLLABUS
- An introduction to the analysis of film
This unit will occupy roughly the first month of the semester (through September). The texts for this section of the course include selections from James Monaco’s How to Read a Film, John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson’s Film Studies: Critical Approaches, and Constance Penley’s Feminism and Film. The latter anthology includes the now-indispensable 1975 article by Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” as well as a range of feminist responses to that famous essay. The Hill and Gibson anthology provides students with a range of different theoretical approaches for the analysis of film, including psychoanalytic theory, audience analysis, and Marxist theory.
- A survey of queer film studies
This unit will occupy the first three weeks of October and will carry students through work in queer studies from 1978 to the present. The unit includes selections from Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society and Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, and Alexander Doty’s Making It Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Additionally, students will read selections from three ground-breaking anthologies in queer film studies: Bad-Object Choices, editors, How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video; Martha Gever et al., editors, Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video; and Ellis Hanson, editor, Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film.
- An introduction to contemporary work at the intersection of queer studies and transnational studies (with some specific emphasis on lgbtq cultures and eastern Europe)
This unit will begin before the trip to Prague and conclude in the final weeks of the semester, after returning to Washington, D.C. Two sets of reading will be included here, one more focused directly on eastern Europe, and the other on queer theories of globalization. Selections include: “Identity Politics and the (B)Orders of Heterosexism: Gays, Lesbians and Feminists in the Czech Media after 1989”; “‘Don’t Get Pricked!’: Representation and the Politics of Sexuality in the Czech Republic”; “Queering Society in Postsocialist Slovakia”; and “The Prague Experience: Gay Male Tourism and the Neocolonial Invention of an Embodied Border.” The second set of readings will begin with selections from the anthology Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism and will end, back in the United States, with readings from two important recent texts in the field: Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
- The Prague International LGBTQ Film Festival (on-site in Prague, intended to bring all these issues together)